


the earth died screaming

by janie_tangerine



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angels are Dicks, Angst, Gen, Memory Alteration, Mental Health Issues, Post Season 4, Season 5 Spoilers, last man on earth, surprise character - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-19
Updated: 2012-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-31 11:00:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Heaven on Earth becomes real and the Apocalypse goes as angels had planned, Jimmy Novak finds himself in control of his own body again and seemingly the only real human left in a world where the climate has changed, ghost towns are the norm and time flows strangely. The fact that since he wakes up, and for the entire following year, he keeps on hearing Castiel's voice inside his head is probably just proof that he's going crazy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Written for the second round of <a href="http://http://apocabigbang.livejournal.com/">apocabigbang</a> on LJ; art for it (a video) can be found <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDVlFQeul1U">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. all alone

**Author's Note:**

> Premise based on Margaret Atwood's [Oryx and Crake](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and_Crake), though the plot goes in a completely different way. Title from Tom Waits.

  
_Snowman was once a bird but he's forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out; (...) Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone._

__Oh, Jimmy, this is so positive. It makes me happy when you grasp this. Paradice is lost, but you have a Paradice within you, happier far. _Then that silvery laugh, right in his ear._

_I listened, thought Jimmy, but I didn't hear._

from _Oryx and Crake_ , Margaret Atwood.

 

Jimmy Novak wakes up to sun filtering through leaves and hard wood pressing against his back.

For a second he’s startled, then he remembers. Remembering things is a tricky, tricky thing these days. He has come far enough to piece together a fairly complete picture, even if it still has its holes, but it took time to get there. And every time he wakes up, it always takes a second for him to place things. But this whole deal about where he spends most of his time, lately, is always the first thing that comes back to him. After all, when you spend the night and at times your day in a tree, you don’t want to forget _why_ you’re there.

He remembers saying yes to Castiel clearer than anything else. It’s the second thing that comes to him; but he knows there’s something else that always escapes him every time. It’s just that he can’t grasp it, not in the first minutes after he opens his eyes.

It will come. Sometime.

Jimmy wraps himself in a bed sheet that is dirtier than he’d like, and sits up straighter before climbing down. The tree isn’t exactly comfortable, but the ground is worse and the one time he had tried to sleep down there he had a close encounter with a wolf that almost got him killed. So, tree it is, for now. There’s a wide branch, up far enough that he doesn’t have any company which isn’t birds, and it’s comfortable enough not to kill his back for good.

He takes a couple of steps forward and starts moving handfuls of earth and dirt. It’s a short while before a plastic bag appears. He takes it out of the hole it lies in, then quickly scans the contents. A suit jacket, a pair of matching trousers and a dirty dress shirt, all three worn out and full of holes. Then there’s a pair of ripped jeans and a worn out long sleeved shirt, along with a flannel that barely holds itself together. Then there’s another small bag inside, like one that a long time ago would be used to keep manicure tools. Jimmy sighs and takes out the jeans, the flannel, the small bag and the long sleeved shirt. Then he digs another hole, puts the plastic bag with the suit back there and covers it up with dirt and dead leaves. When he’s sure it’s hidden, he grabs his clothes and walks away for maybe a couple of minutes until he reaches a small clearing. There’s a lake there, with a small waterfall, and while staying here would be ill-advised because where there’s water there are animals and not all of them are harmless, he still tries to come here as often as he can.

His current lifestyle makes him generally filthy, and Jimmy knows that well enough, but there are things he knows from before, that he remembers from before.

He remembers hating feeling dirty. He remembers always telling his daughter

( _Claire, Claire, where is Claire, where is –_ )

that she should always wash her hands at least before eating, and he can’t just scroll off that part of his brain that shouts _hygiene is important, IMPORTANT!_ , even if rationally it’s useless. So Jimmy places his meager possessions on the ground, covers them with his dirty sheet (no point in washing that one), picks a tree to relieve himself and when he’s done he steps under the waterfall. It’s enough to wash away the grime, and he feels marginally better. He dries himself with the side of the sheet which looks less dirty and puts on the jeans and the shirts, then holds up his small manicure bag. He opens it and takes out a small razor and a tube of shaving cream which is half-used. He needs to waste less of it. He pours a bit of it on his palm, then carefully tries to spread it as far as he can. In the end it’s a thin layer and there’s still some stubble remaining on his face when he’s done shaving, but he looks human enough. Or as close to it as it gets.

It’s pretty much the only important thing for him, lately. He wants to look like a human, and possibly a dignified one.

Maybe because he needs to feel different from _them_.

But there’s a reason he tries not to even meet them, if he can avoid it.

_(Jimmy wasn’t like this once._

_He used to live in a nice house, not in a stupid tree. It was in Pontiac, Illinois. At times he wonders where he is. Is he far from Pontiac, is he not? He hasn’t found out yet._

_Jimmy had a nice life, once. He had a beautiful wife and they had a daughter who was the apple of his eye and he sold advertisements for radio stations._

_He remembers that because he thinks that half of the time, it’s advertisements he hears in his head._

_STAY POSITIVE, they say, and IT DOESN’T TAKE MUCH TO TURN A HALF EMPTY GLASS INTO A FULL ONE!, and a lot of other things, and Jimmy mostly ignores them._

_Mostly.)_

When he deems himself presentable, he walks back to his tree, barefoot because his shoes had fallen apart a long time ago and he can’t exactly find another pair. Also, it would be useless. They’d only fall apart again. He folds the sheet, climbs back up on the tree, leaves it hanging on a branch lower than the one he sleeps on, and then he drops to the ground. There’s what used to be a refrigerator, oddly sticking out from the bushes. It has a combination lock. Jimmy found it when this situation had just been new for him, even if he can’t remember how exactly. It doesn’t keep anything cool anymore, but at least what food he manages to find doesn’t get eaten by insects.

He opens the lock and opens the refrigerator’s door. There’s a half-melted bar of chocolate inside which Jimmy can’t bring himself to eat

( _Hershey’s Take Five, it was Claire’s favorite_ )

and then a couple of tangerines which shouldn’t be growing here, but you don’t say no to what you find and he has found stranger fruit growing on trees. He’s pretty sure that there never were banana trees in the United States (and he’s pretty sure that he has at least the continent pegged right). He shakes his head. His stomach rumbles and his jeans hang dangerously low on his hips (they used to fit. A while ago. He thinks it’s been eight months. Maybe nine. Maybe a year. He hasn’t exactly counted). He can’t survive on this much longer.

But he doesn’t have any weapon with him which isn’t that tiny, useless razor and Jimmy never killed anything in his life. Not when he was himself, at least.

( _Dean and Sam Winchester did!, a merry voice that seems just out of an advertisement tells him. Maybe you should track them down! They would –_

_Shut up, Jimmy thinks._ )

But finding more fruit or anything edible means moving away from the handful of miles in the woods that separate Jimmy’s tree from _them_. He will have to meet them if he wants to find any kind of nourishment. It’s not like he’s worried that they will hurt him, they won’t, but he has his reasons not to be looking forward to a little chat.

He thinks he’ll postpone that. Just for a short while. He grabs a tangerine, closes the refrigerator, locks it up again and climbs back up the tree. He peels the tangerine’s skin off and turns it in his hands. It’s slightly bigger than the tangerines he used to eat in his other life. It has definitely more flesh, and it tastes sharper than the ones from before. He breaks it in half, then picks a slice and starts eating. He tries to take it slow, but his stomach rumbles and before he knows it, he has stuffed the rest of that half in his mouth and then the second half as well. His lips are smeared with sticky tangerine juice and he’s still hungry. He licks his lips, then runs his hand over his mouth and licks it clean, too, and he tries not to think about how there used to be napkins, once upon a time.

He sighs, shaking his head. Wondering how it came to this never helps.

“You are better than this, Jimmy,” Castiel says, and Jimmy shakes his head.

Because yes, that had to happen. There isn’t a day in which it doesn’t happen.

It’s just his luck that he’s living alone in a tree and going probably crazy and instead of his dead wife (because he knows that Amelia has to be dead; he might be going crazy, but delusional is something Jimmy never was, or well, at least not after he said yes) he hears the angel who possessed him in his head. Just like old times, and Jimmy fails to find it funny.

“Go away. You’re not real,” Jimmy replies, closing his eyes and leaning back against the tree’s trunk. He has been trying this since he woke up in full control of his own body, but the voice in his head is too stubborn to just leave him alone.

“But I am. I am, if you’ll just believe me,” Castiel answers, and Jimmy is just fucking grateful that he’s speaking in his real voice and not in Jimmy’s own. Then again, he’s making Castiel up, it’s his brain deciding.

“And you’re such a great help, aren’t you? Sorry, but I’m done believing you. I know you’re just in my head.”

Castiel doesn’t answer and when Jimmy opens his eyes, he stays silent.

Figures.

He shrugs and he wonders if he should be thankful that this weather is never cold.

\--

Jimmy stays where he is for another couple of hours, maybe (he doesn’t know: the watch he’s wearing stopped at noon, December 12th, 2012) and then his stomach becomes too loud for him to ignore.

Alright, he thinks, let’s do this. He climbs down from the tree and checks that his old suit is well hidden. Then he grabs the sheet (if he doesn’t manage to get back here tonight he’ll need it), puts the manicure bag inside it, folds it around the bag eight times and tucks the bundle under his arm. Then he starts walking.

Since he doesn’t wear shoes anymore, the soles of his feet have hardened up. A lot. Still, it’s good for him, that there’s nothing that can cut you on the ground.

Advantages of living in a brave new world.

He walks steadily for one hour, following the path he always takes. It’s not like he actually has a great time passing there, but in order to grab food you need to reach this small, deserted town about four miles from his wood. In order to get there, you need to pass through what used to be a stretch of highway and which now… well, it isn’t much of that anymore.

It’s where _they_ live.

He walks up to that highway and looks at them from afar. He counts them. Twenty. Exactly as many as they were last time, and the time before, and the one before, and so on. Just once they were fifteen, because five were off _fulfilling their purpose_ , but none of them is doing that now.

He sighs and takes a breath and walks forward; when he’s some fifteen feet from them, the first three turn towards him. He has been silent, but they feel his footsteps. He looks at them for a second, trying to remember who they are.

Cassiel, Harachel and Jophiel, he thinks. Or well, it’s not exactly the real angels. But they don’t have names, so he goes for the next best option.

They’re three young girls, seven and nine and about eleven, respectively. They’ve been that age since he met them, but when you have an angel inside you, you don’t age. The first two are blondes, the third has red hair (all of them have either blonde or red hair), their skin is pale, they’re completely naked and they don’t have a name. Jimmy calls them like that because the only reason they exist is that the angel he names them after needs a vessel to be on Earth when he decides to take a walk down here. (From what Jimmy gathered, being an angel in his true form anywhere which isn’t Heaven is more of a pain than else.)

Christ. A lifetime ago, the bare idea of looking at naked girls his daughter’s age would have made him throw up and say a lot of very righteous things. But they’re not really girls. And he has learned to bypass it.

If his old preacher saw him now, he’d probably say that Jimmy was heading straight to Hell.

Right. Sure.

But the freakiest thing about it, is that _all_ of them (no matter what age) have Dean Winchester’s eyes.

_(He remembers freaking out the first time he met them. That first time they had asked him who he was waiting for, he had said Castiel, he was answered that Castiel was dead. Good, for a confirm that the voice in your head is there just because you’re going crazy._

_The Castiel in Jimmy’s head had said, “I’m sorry. I tried to stop this.”_

_What is this, Jimmy had thought._

_“It’s Heaven on Earth,” Castiel had said, but by now Jimmy is pretty sure it was just himself providing an answer just so that he wouldn’t lose it right there and then._ )

In Heaven on Earth, apparently, the only human-looking things around are… enhanced people made so that angels can use them as vessels. He doesn’t know why the hell would angels need human-looking vessels if they made a point of wiping out the human population from the planet (sometimes he has flashes of memories which he’s sure belong to Castiel. That’s how he knows), but maybe they see it like stating that they won and it’s just in order to shove it in Jimmy’s face. He’s the only one who can appreciate that statement, after all.

He thinks that the weather is always so warm because everyone except him is naked, but then again, they barely eat or drink, and they don’t use clothes or sleep or sweat or have sex, as far as Jimmy knows.

Just like angels, or a bit short of that.

He nods at the three of them and they nod back. By now, they think he belongs to some kind of weird species who looks similar to them just by mere chance. It’s not like they’re hostile or anything. They’re just scary (to him, because he doesn’t scare them. He wouldn’t scare anyone, the way he is, but it’s not the point). And they have green eyes with thick eyelashes which are just like Dean Winchester’s. Jimmy’s memory might not be entirely reliable, these days, but he remembers them well enough to be sure. That’s why he hates looking at them.

Then again, it’s not even their fault. What do they know? And what does Jimmy know, anyway, except for a couple of things?

Cassiel stands up and moves towards him, and Jimmy nods at her.

“Greetings, Jimmy,” she says. Her tone is always skeptical, like she doesn’t get why he’d need a name or why he’d have such a strange one.

“Greetings,” he answers her, trying not to show that he’s distressed. Not that he’s distressed much around these particular twenty anymore, they’re neighbors and they learned to live with each other, but they still creep him out. He raises a hand and nods towards the path bringing to the village. Cassiel nods, even if she doesn’t get why does he always go there once in a while, and he nods back before starting to move again.

Jimmy leaves them behind and walks faster in order to get to the town.

\--

There’s a reason why he’d rather live in a tree than just staying here. The entire town is deserted and half of the houses are crumbling down in pieces. It’s creepy and decaying and no one is there, and it just makes Jimmy think that it’s a metaphor for his entire race. And he can’t allow himself to go there, not yet, and so he lives in a goddamn tree.

He goes straight to the local supermarket. The sliding doors are open, of course, and Jimmy just steps inside and grabs a plastic bag from under a check out. No one comes here. No one ever has come, since he broke in the first time. He holds his breath until he’s far from the meat section and its flies, and goes straight for the canned food. He grabs some Campbell tomato soup, beans, canned pears, cereal and whatever food he can find that has an expiration date after 2013. When he has enough stuff to last him two weeks, he changes aisle and grabs some new shaving cream, hoping that it’s still good. He can’t be sure, but who knows.

He looks up at the sky when he’s out, trying to decide what he should do. It took him four hours to get here, but he had just his sheet with him. Now he has a good seven pounds of things to bring with him, and it’ll slow him down. He’s sure he left around noon, because it was hotter than usual even if it’s never cold anyway. The sun is still high enough, but not that much, which means it’s mid-afternoon. All things considered, it’ll take him another five hours or more to go back. Which means it’d be dark, and he could get lost, and he doesn’t even have a weapon.

Not that he’d know how to use one. Ironic, that he had an angel inside him for years, and he wouldn’t even know how to use a gun.

He settles on staying here for the night, even if he’d really rather not. He sighs and tries to see if there’s any house which doesn’t give him the creeps just from glancing at it. He comes in front of one which seems good enough, but he glances at the window and almost gags. There’s a body on an armchair, and it looks like mummies in Egyptian museums used to look when Egyptian museums still existed. He walks away quickly and then he notices that in a shop’s window there are Swiss knives.

Well, he figures, no one will mind. He tries the door (it’s open), gets inside and grabs one which has scissors, a can-opener and a knife among the rest. Then he walks out and moves on.

In the end he settles on a one-storey house which has a locked door. If it’s locked, he probably won’t find corpses inside (well, it has worked until now). He uses the Swiss knife to break the door’s lock and slams it back behind him when he gets inside. There’s a chair near the entrance and so he drags it in front of the door. It’s useless, but one thing he has learned is that in this brave new world you can walk straight into a whole damn lot of dangerous animals other than wolves (he has an idea that zoos aren’t working anymore, and the warm climate probably is good for some tropical species as well), and as stated there’s a reason he sleeps in a tree.

There’s not much around; chairs, a table, a sofa. Everything is covered in dust. Jimmy finds the kitchen, but all the drawers are empty. Figures.

He finds a couple of bedrooms. One has walls painted in pale blue and a crib and toys all around, all covered in dust, and Jimmy slams the door as soon as he realizes what it is. Then he finds another one, which has a king sized bed, a bookshelf which is half empty and nothing else. He thinks the people in here must have fled; he’s also sure that it didn’t help them eventually, but he’s too tired to think about anything else. The bed is made, though. Sheets and blankets and everything. Jimmy figures that sleeping comfortably for one night won’t hurt him. He checks the all the drawers in the room first, and finds one full of linen sheets. He grabs a couple (one is red, one has pink flowers printed on it), figuring it’ll come a time when his current sheet will be useless, and then he raises the covers and crawls under them.

He tries not to think about anything before he falls asleep.

\--

_He dreams, he always dreams, but sometimes it’s things he remembers. Sometimes it’s not, and he’s almost sure that what he dreams are Castiel’s memories._

_It should just show that he’s really going crazy, because if Castiel isn’t here anymore, why would Jimmy dream his memories?_

_It doesn’t matter. But he thinks they are, if only because he never manages to grasp the whole picture. It’s sentences and flashes, but he never sees it all. It’s like whatever he’s dreaming about is too big for him._

_He might not be that off the mark._

_He hears voices, tonight, and there are light flashes in the darkness, but it’s all there is._

It will be as it should, _one voice says._

We’ll build Earth in our image, _another chimes in._

Michael will, _the first voice corrects the second_.

We have no right, _Castiel almost shouts, and Jimmy would recognize Castiel’s voice everywhere._

You became weak, _the first voice says again, and then there’s blinding light and pain and_ IwishIhadhadthetimetotellDean, _echoes into Jimmy’s head, and then it’s over._

\--

Jimmy wakes up shivering, his lips parted; he thinks he has screamed. That wouldn’t really surprise him. He breathes, slow, and glances out of the window. It’s night. He doesn’t know how far into it, but he must have slept at least seven hours if it was afternoon when he let himself drift out. He stands still, just breathing, feeling thankful that the comforter is keeping him warm. He feels chilly, down to the inside of his bones. It was that dream, he’s sure. He just lies and breathes and tries not to cry or move, and he just tries to feel the warmth around him.

“What did I do to deserve this?” he whispers, quietly, to no one. “Castiel, you son of a bitch, _what did I do_?”

This time, Castiel’s voice doesn’t answer.

It’s not a surprise. If Castiel was real, Jimmy doubts he’d have an answer for that. And if he’s in Jimmy’s head, well, Jimmy himself can’t come up with it.

\--

Jimmy gets out of bed at dawn; there’s no point in staying anymore, not when there’s light outside. He opens the drawer with the linens again and finds a couple of heavy blankets; he weights the pro and cons of bringing them with him (they’re heavy and they would slow him down, but they could be useful) and then he decides to pick one. He moves to the kitchen, eats some of the cereal that he had taken from the supermarket the day before and then goes to the bathroom, figuring that he might as well use the one chance he has to clean himself up in a civilized place. There’s water, but it’s cold; Jimmy figures it’s good enough that there’s water at all. He washes his face and when he looks at himself in the mirror he can’t help wincing. He’s thinner than the last time he has looked at himself in a proper mirror, his clothes are falling to pieces and there are dark bags under his eyes. He has a couple sunburns on his face and neck and in comparison to… to _them_ , he looks like a failure of evolution.

Maybe it isn’t that wrong of a definition.

Jimmy shaves and washes his face again, and then he picks up his plastic sack, his sheets and his blanket and steps out of the house.

He also grabs some sunblock in the supermarket and smears it over his face before marching straight out of the town. The sign with its name isn’t there anymore, so he doesn’t even know where he is.

It figures.

He walks slowly, not wanting to tire himself too much. He never was one for working out, even if he always kept himself in shape; but since he woke up in the brave new world he found himself in, he has lost most of the muscle mass he had, which wasn’t much in the first place. And it means that carrying his entire bundle is enough to tire him.

Jimmy tries not to think. If he does, he might just get angry and it wouldn’t do.


	2. paradise is lost

He probably should be disturbed by how  _they_  look at him when he’s carrying something. But they just don’t get it, they  _can’t_  get it; after all, they don’t need anything, of course they’d look at him like he was strange. In their eyes, he is. That’s why Jimmy doesn’t really mind and why he isn’t disturbed. He’s just different to them, and it’s not like they don’t majorly creep him out as a basic reaction anyway; it’s just fair if  _he_ creeps them out in return.   
  
It takes him most of the day to get back to his tree and when he arrives he’s tempted to just drop down on the ground and pass out, but he can’t really allow himself that. He opens the refrigerator and drops all the food inside it. He keeps the chocolate bar out because he doesn’t know if he can stand the sight anymore. He’s eating it tonight at some point. Then he digs out the plastic bag and takes off his clothes and wraps himself up in one of the new sheets; he folds everything neatly (he doesn’t know why he bothers, but he needs to hang on to something), then hides the plastic bag along with his new toiletries under the dirt again. When he’s satisfied, the sun has just set and well, isn’t that lucky? He really shouldn’t be on the ground at night. He picks up the blanket and his old sheet and climbs up into the tree. He finds the larger branch again, drapes the older sheet over it and wraps the blanket around his shoulders. It’s not even cold, but it feels marginally nicer than it felt without, and so he keeps it on.   
  
These are times when he hopes he could just fall asleep on the spot, but this isn’t that day. He just lies there, his eyes open, scanning the other trees in front of him. There’s a lot of them. They’re luscious, even. He doesn’t think he has ever seen such a luscious forest in his entire life.   
  
He’s still wearing his wedding ring. He doesn’t look at it, he never does, because if he does –   
  
_(… you may kiss the bride, the priest had said (_ their  _priest, they had known him for ages, they had met in his parsonage even, when they were kids), and he had kissed Amelia right there. She was dressed all in white and she was so beautiful, so much that he could barely bring himself to touch her cheek. Her lips had been soft and she had sighed against his mouth, and that had been just so perfect, even if it hadn’t been a fancy wedding or one full of attendees. And that night he had taken off her shirt for the first time and she had done the same for him and neither of them had done it before because they believed they should wait until marriage, and then her skin was impossibly soft under his hands and her fingers combed through his hair and –)_   
  
if he does he thinks about how much time he missed and about how stupid the both of them were. They wasted so much time. He wasted so much time. He didn’t even get the chance to tell her that he loved her for the last time because she had a demon inside her.   
  
At times, what hurts most is not that his faith got him screwed over. It’s that he had faith in something that never deserved it in the first place, because why would you want to worship things who want to destroy your world?   
  
“I never wanted that,” Castiel says, soft, still in his real voice, and Jimmy wants to cry.   
  
“Maybe, but it doesn’t change the result,” Jimmy answers, knowing he’s talking to thin air.   
  
“No. No, it does not, and from your point of view, it doesn’t mean much,” Castiel agrees, and Jimmy wonders when he became so crazy that he came up with some voice that agrees with him, anyway.   
  
“Whatever, Castiel. You aren’t real, anyway, so why bothering?”   
  
“Why are you so set on believing that I am not?” the voice answers back, soft, almost regretful.   
  
Jimmy doesn’t answer.   
  
He has a perfectly good reason to be sure that Castiel isn’t real.   
  
\--   
  
_(He dreams about that time again.  
  
In detail.  
  
He never tries to think hard about it, if it happens that he goes there.  
  
But he has no control over dreams.  
  
It was the first time he met_  them.  _He’s sure it was Raziel telling him. He remembers because the vessel was a small blonde girl, around eleven years old, who looked like Claire, except that she had Dean’s eyes.  
  
“Who are you waiting for?” she had asked.  
  
“What… what do you mean? Who are you?” Jimmy had asked.  
  
“I’m no one. I exist because of Raziel. I wait for him. It’s what I am. Who are you?”  
  
She made it sound so simple.  
  
“I… I think I am a bit different, but… it’s… I’m waiting for Castiel,” Jimmy had answered. Wasn’t that the truth?  
  
She had looked at him narrowing her eyes.  
  
“You can’t be,” she had answered.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because Castiel is dead.”  
  
“… dead?” Jimmy had whispered.  
  
“Some of them didn’t want something to happen, I think. I don’t know what. But this thing happened anyway, and they died.”  
  
She said it nonchalantly, like she didn’t get what she was saying.  
  
Jimmy still thinks she didn’t.  
  
“Don’t… don’t you know what was it, that they didn’t want to happen?”  
  
“Why would I? It’s not my concern,” she had said, calmly, almost smiling, absolutely accepting.  
  
Sure, Jimmy had thought, you only live for an angel to possess you without even asking you whether you want it or not because you probably don’t even know what it means to choose; of course it isn’t your concern.  
  
“Oh,” she had said, “maybe that’s why you’re different.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“If Castiel is dead and you were made for him, then he will never come back for you. So that’s why you need things.”  
  
It had sickened Jimmy, back then. He had wanted to say, you can’t just see yourself as some kind of object which will waste away the second it isn’t useful anymore, you can’t, you can’t, we’re_  more _than that, we have free will, we have, we are, but then he realized that for her, it wasn’t true.  
  
They aren’t. They don’t. They don’t even know what free will is. They don’t know that they can say no because they don’t know what no means.  
  
They’re not even properly humans.  
  
They’re_  vessels –)   
  
\--   
  
Jimmy wakes up screaming. Again.   
  
He clutches the blanket around his shoulders, hot tears burning behind his eyelids. He feels frail and useless and he just doesn’t get it. Why is he even here? If he’s the last man on earth why is he even alive? What’s his purpose at all?   
  
At times he thinks that he should just climb up higher and jump, or take his razor, go inside that small lake and slit his wrists.   
  
He never does.   
  
He wishes he could say it was because you just don’t kill yourself, and being a vessel for an angel and having sacrificed your life to it hasn’t been enough to drill it out of your head.   
  
It’s that he knows what’s after death, and even if this is miserable, he can either go to Hell, which he’s pretty sure he doesn’t deserve, or he could end up in Heaven, and if this is Heaven on Earth then he isn’t sure he wants to see how the real one is.   
  
Ironic. One spends his life sure that if he does things right he’ll get himself a nice small piece of Eden for a reward, and then he finds out that it’s better not to go.   
  
“Why me,” he whispers, aware that he’s crying. After all why would he feel salt on his lips otherwise? And it’s not like anyone is around to mock him for it. “Why did you have to take  _me_ ?” If Castiel hadn’t, now he’d just be dead with his wife and his kid and maybe he’d be just one human among others enslaved in Heaven or something, but… he wouldn’t have known. He wouldn’t have had to stand this.   
  
“Cas, really, son of a bitch doesn’t cover it,” he keeps on, and if he’s talking to himself, well, who’s there to give a damn anyway? “Why did you do this to me? Fuck, you promised they’d be okay, you promised I would!”   
  
He’s aware that he’s rambling by now, and one angel alone couldn’t really have kept that promise against all the other ones, but rationality can be saved for… for the vessels, he figures. He’ll be as irrational as he pleases.   
  
“I wish I could say fuck you,” he keeps on, and it’s funny that he still feels weird saying  _fuck_  when he spent thirty-odd years not swearing to save his life, “but I can’t even say that because I know you didn’t know. But you really can’t expect me to do this for another twenty years or whatever, can you? I’ll just go even crazier than I already am. Fuck, at least couldn’t you have killed me when you left? Or at least leave me with someone who doesn’t think that their only purpose in life is being a meatsuit? It’s not fucking fun being the last man on earth, you know?”   
  
“You aren’t,” Castiel answers, and Jimmy almost falls off the branch for the shock.   
  
“I can’t... I can’t, I can’t be this far gone, not before ten years at least,” he says, rushed, frantic, because he just  _can’t_ . If a voice he made up tells him he isn’t alone, then it means he’s really going utterly mad and he can’t take it yet.   
  
“You are not… far gone,” Castiel says, almost sounding unsure of what Jimmy means, and Jimmy has to give props to himself. He’s imagining Castiel pretty much right.   
  
“You’re  _dead_ ! You can’t be talking to me and saying what I want to hear unless I’m going nuts!” Jimmy shouts back, and if it means he really is nuts, well, he’ll ignore it for now.   
  
“Where do you think I was when they killed me?” Castiel answers back, and Jimmy doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, but maybe yes he has dreamed it –   
  
_… and this is what your stupid ideas will gain you, someone who has Dean Winchester’s face but isn’t Dean Winchester says, and he raises his hand and he’s kneeling, no, Castiel is kneeling, and he isn’t bowing his head even if he should –  
  
Spare him, Castiel says, he doesn’t deserve –  
  
He served you, the stranger says, he’ll get what you deserve as well.  
  
But I gave him my word, at least let me keep it, Castiel keeps on, sounding almost desperate, I don’t want to die not having kept –  
  
You should have thought about it before, the other angel, because it might wear Dean’s face but he’s an angel, says, but then he stops for a second. But I won’t remove the precautions you already took, and that’s all the mercy you’ll get, he says, and then he moves his hand and brings it on Castiel’s forehead and there’s painpainpainpaineverywhere and –_   
  
“You were inside me,” Jimmy breathes out. “But it doesn’t mean anything. I remember it. So? I might be making this up anyway.”   
  
“I was. And yes, Michael burned me out of you. But there is something I can pride myself for.”   
  
“Which would be?” Jimmy mutters back, figuring that by now there’s no going back.   
  
“My… my brothers always underestimated me,” Castiel answers. “You can hear me because I am still inside you, Jimmy. I… when you said yes, I touched your soul. A small fraction of my grace always stayed with you. You can’t see me because it’s not enough for me to leave you, and you have control because I could never possess you like  _this_ .”   
  
Jimmy thinks he might throw up.   
  
“Let’s say that I believe you. You were inside me all this time and you choose to say it  _now_ ?” he’s positively screaming by now.   
  
“Jimmy. Please, listen to me. I know I have no right to ask it of you, but… it’s hard for me to survive like this. Talking to you for long stretches of time just… consumes me. And I  _did_  try to tell you, but I’m not surprised that you wouldn’t believe me.”   
  
“Then shut the fuck up!”   
  
Shaking, Jimmy clutches the blanket tighter.   
  
“Alright, maybe I have my reasons to hate you, but if you’re really here then I don’t want you to die, not when you’re…”   
  
“Jimmy,” Castiel keeps on, “even if I didn’t talk to you, I would die. Eventually. A fragment of grace isn’t enough for me to survive on. And if accelerating the process means I can… means I can make amends to you, then I don’t care. I’ve been waiting until now, but I can’t anymore. Please. Will you listen to me?”   
  
Jimmy takes a breath, wondering how he isn’t freaking out.   
  
Maybe it’s because by now nothing could freak him out.   
  
“Alright.”   
  
“You need to go home.”   
  
Jimmy laughs, bitter and without any amusement.   
  
“I don’t even know where the fuck I am. And home is probably falling down in pieces.”   
  
“The town you pick supplies in is named Fairbury. It is about fifteen miles from Pontiac. I am sure you would find enough signs if you walked along the highway. And your house is not. Before I rebelled, I… had taken precautions. In order to protect your family. It did not really work as I hoped, but… you remember it. My precautions are still there.”   
  
“And why should I go home? Just to suffer even more? I doubt Amelia or Claire are there. And couldn’t you share the information before, at all?”   
  
“No, they aren’t. But… there are things I know. Please. Jimmy, go home. You will understand when you get there. I know that you still don’t believe me now, but I had to try.”   
  
Castiel falls silent then, like talking required too much effort, and Jimmy clutches the blanket tighter around him and wonders what he should do.   
  
\--   
  
The next morning, he climbs down from the tree, folds all his sheets neatly, folds the blankets as well, changes into his jeans that are way too large and his shirts that have new holes in them, and then he packs up as much food as he can. He puts sunblock all over his face and hands and feet, and then he throws his plastic bag over his shoulder and starts to walk.   
  
Mostly, he wants proof that Castiel is real. If the town is really Fairbury he needs to walk a bit along that stretch of highway and then he’ll find some sign soon enough. If they match, then it means he’s not mad, and he figures he can give that a try. It’s not like he has better things to do like climbing back up his tree and wasting away in there.   
  
He walks around that stretch of highway where the vessels live, not really feeling like talking to them. He’s panting and sweating and feeling like he’ll just topple over and die on the side of the road when he finally gets to a sign (the sun is hot, too hot for someone who needs clothes), and it reads  _Pontiac 14 miles_  and suddenly he remembers it, he remembers that exact sign because   
  
_once Claire had gone to this party of a friend of hers in second grade and her family had this huge house near Fairbury and they had driven there and they passed that exact sign and Claire was so excited as they drove, and Jimmy had thanked the Lord for having blessed them with such a beautiful little girl and –_   
  
Jimmy wipes away tears and starts walking again.   
  
_You’renotcrazyyou’renotcrazyyou’renotcrazy_  is everything going through his head right now. Castiel is silent, but Jimmy knows he probably won’t talk until he gets to Pontiac. And if Castiel is real it means he hasn’t been lying and that there’s  _something_  in Pontiac. Jimmy doesn’t know what it is but at this point he doesn’t mind waiting. He keeps on walking.   
  
\--   
  
Three miles in, the only thing he’s grateful for is that in the brave new world you end up bumping into small water sources pretty regularly, so he didn’t have to bring water with him. Which is good, because it’d have just been added weight. It’s pathetic that he’s tired already, but he barely eats enough to keep himself not too underweight. He can’t ask too much of himself.   
  
Meanwhile he just would like to know what the hell is supposed to wait for him at home. He knows it won’t be his wife or kid. He also doubts anyone else he knew survived. Unless a short enough time has passed.   
  
“If you can’t answer me don’t,” Jimmy says, still feeling like he’s going crazy, “but can you at least tell me how many years have passed since the angels won?”   
  
“Are you sure you want to know?” Castiel replies, quietly, almost like he’s sorry to give him the answer.   
  
“Well, I stuck with this for at least a year, I guess knowing can’t make things worse.”   
  
“One hundred years,” comes from inside his head, and Jimmy almost throws up on the side of the highway before forcing himself to move on.   
  
“How the fuck is the food in supermarkets still edible?” Jimmy almost screams, and Castiel doesn’t answer for a second. Jimmy can almost feel him wondering whether he should answer and therefore give Jimmy’s sanity the last blow, probably, and so he waits.   
  
“It’s… complicated,” Castiel starts. “Or perhaps it really isn’t. Do you… do you dream my memories, sometimes?”   
  
“Sometimes,” Jimmy agrees, even if he should say  _most times_  instead. “But it’s mostly painful stuff. And Dean not being Dean. And light. But it’s cold light.”   
  
“Jimmy, this is Heaven on Earth.”   
  
“Thank you, I had gotten that far.”   
  
“Time works like in Heaven. One hundred years in Heaven time is equivalent to two years in Earth time.”   
  
“… again, please?”   
  
Castiel’s voice sounds half-frustrated. “One-hundred years have passed, but for… for  _things_ , Earthly things, human things, it has been just one. That’s why the food is edible. But you perceive time in the human way. You’ve been in control of your body for what you think is one year. But in fact, it’s fifty.”   
  
“Okay. I guess I get it. That’s why the bodies are… well, mummies and not dust, right?”   
  
“Yes. I am…”   
  
“Don’t say it. I know.” Jimmy would like to add  _it’s not your fault_ , because it really isn’t Castiel’s fault after all, but he needs to process this and he isn’t at the forgiving stage yet.   
  
The both of them stay silent as Jimmy walks on.   
  
\--   
  
At seven miles he’s about to faint. The sun is high in the sky and he can’t stand the heat, but if he stops now he won’t ever manage to get to Pontiac before dark, and he can’t afford to sleep in the open.   
  
Especially on a stretch of open highway. So he grits his teeth and mans up and walks on, and that’s when the woman appears some fifteen feet ahead.   
  
She’s a vessel, goes unsaid. Red hair, those green eyes, completely naked, about fifteen or sixteen. She looks at him like she’s taking pity on him, but Jimmy knows he must be imagining it, because they don’t know what pity is.   
  
He stops when he arrives in front of her. She’s staring at him still, like she’s also trying to figure him out. He remembers that while the ones living near Fairbury are adjusted to him by now and probably just see him as some weirdo who’s at times interesting to talk with, for others he must really look like an alien.   
  
“Who are you waiting for?” he asks, knowing the drill by know. Asking them who they  _are_  is useless. They don’t get the concept of being different from someone else. They get the concept of being there because angels need them when they want to come down here, sure, but having a personality? That’s a whole other dilemma.   
  
“Barachiel,” she answers, calmly. “You are different,” she states. It almost sounds like an accusation.   
  
“I used to wait for Castiel,” he answers, the lie well-practiced enough, and she raises an eyebrow. Then she bites her lip.   
  
This is way more of the usual reaction he gets.   
  
“So that’s what happens to us if the one we’re waiting for dies,” she says, calm, like she’s just stating something.   
  
“No,” he answers, way too fast, and why would he care for what she thinks?   
  
But it’s a question of… well. Maybe it’s pity on his part. They might be what they are, but they don’t  _know_  it. They don’t know how it was before. And he knows that he looks like a wreck in comparison to them. If it was him in her position, he wouldn’t want to think that… becoming like  _him_  would be his destiny if his angel dies.   
  
“I am… I am just not like you. He took me before. A long time ago. When things were different. I don’t know what happens to you if the one you wait for dies, but… this,” he says gesturing at himself, “I don’t think it’s the case. Believe me, I don’t think you will ever have to worry about it.”   
  
She looks at him again, just staring, maybe getting it and maybe not, and then Jimmy moves and walks past her. He can’t bear that stare. He feels like he was some kind of old computer and she was the brand new model which does everything better and in half of the time.   
  
“Old models are usually more reliable,” Castiel says, sounding tired, almost old, and it makes no sense because Castiel should be timeless.   
  
Except that he isn’t anymore.   
  
“Models of what?” Jimmy asks back, not feeling much up for trying to sound angry.   
  
“Everything,” Castiel answers, and then he’s silent.   
  
Jimmy keeps on walking.   
  
\--   
  
He doesn’t meet anyone else and when he gets to Pontiac he’s sweaty everywhere, he’s panting like he just ran a marathon and his feet are so dirty that it hurts what’s left of his sense of hygiene to look at the soles.   
  
Well, he’s home, and apparently no one else is. Of course. One hundred years have passed. How could anyone be home anyway? Half of the houses are crumbling down and it looks like a ghost town.   
  
“I meant, go  _home_ , Jimmy,” Castiel says, and Jimmy wants to curse him or pretend he didn’t understand, but he’s way past this. He sighs and walks forward. He doesn’t want to go home, he doesn’t want to see home, he doesn’t want to even glance at it, but it’ll be dark shortly and he can’t afford to do anything else.   
  
So he closes his eyes and breathes and thinks _fuck this_ , and he walks home.


	3. I listened but I didn't hear

He expects his house to be dust.   
  
It’s actually the only one standing in the entire road. And there’s a light on in the lower floor.   
  
Jimmy falls on his knees outside the path taking right up to his porch. The garden hasn’t obviously been cared for, but the path is still there and there are all kinds of such pretty flowers where Amelia’s roses used to be.   
  
The brave new world isn’t that bad, on the vegetation side, but still.   
  
Jimmy can’t stand up, he can’t do  _anything_ . That’s his house, it’s still up and  _someone has to be inside it_  and maybe that’s what Castiel meant, but he isn’t sure he can go in. Maybe it’s another vessel. Maybe it’s an angel. And if it is the only other human person on Earth, what could Jimmy say to them?   
  
At least, he thinks he gets what Castiel meant when he said he had taken precautions. There has to be a reason why the house is not fallen down and why the garden looks so nice.   
  
Still, who could the person inside be, anyway? No one survives for one hundred years. Jimmy knows he’s alive just because Castiel kept his body thirty-two for a century, but in the year he has lived in that tree, he has aged like one guy who lives in a tree would have aged in one year. He still isn’t exactly sure of the dynamics but there’s just no fucking way that there’s someone he knows inside.   
  
“Jimmy,” Castiel says, and he sounds almost pleading, “I am… I’m not… please, go inside.”   
  
He sounds wrecked, like someone who is coughing blood as he speaks, and that’s when it hits Jimmy full force.   
  
Castiel told him before. He’s dying. He’s currently just a tiny speck of grace in Jimmy’s body and he’s going to die soon, and he has cheated Heaven this long but he can’t anymore. And while Jimmy has all the reasons to hate him, he’s still using his possibly last energies to give Jimmy  _something_ , which would still be a damn whole lot better than the nothing he has now. He’s trying to keep what’s left to keep of that promise he made a long time ago and Jimmy might be tired and pissed and he’d have rather died than known all of this, but he’ll be damned before he rejects the effort.   
  
“All right,” he whispers, and stands up. He grabs his bundle with one hand and walks the steps up to his porch and opens the door.   
  
He knows the open light is in the kitchen, so he moves there, on automatic. He opens the door and he almost screams when he sees someone sitting at his table.   
  
This someone has light brown hair verging on dirty blonde and is wearing a leather jacket.   
  
Then that someone turns.   
  
And it’s Dean Winchester.   
  
\--   
  
_Dean Winchester_ , Jimmy’s head supplies. Not an angel. It takes just one look in his eyes to see that he’s human and that he isn’t a vessel. Especially that. Vessels have his eyes, but the eyes staring into Jimmy’s aren’t like  _that_ . There’s emotion flashing inside them, actually a whole heap of emotions (shock, fear, happiness, curiosity, but why not recognition?), and that automatically rules out the angel option, too.   
  
“… Dean?” Jimmy whispers, and Dean stares at him and licks his lips.   
  
“Are you a fucking real person? And… do you know me?” he asks back, and suddenly Jimmy’s body shivers with chills.   
  
He has been in Dean’s space for the entirety of one single day one life ago, but he would recognize the voice everywhere. And he has the same mannerism. He holds himself the same way, even if his hands shake just a bit, and Jimmy has never seen him so bewildered.   
  
But that question.   
  
And Dean looks at Jimmy like he doesn’t know who he is. At all.   
  
Which doesn’t make sense, because he damn well should, unless…   
  
Oh,  _fuck_ .   
  
“Don’t… don’t you remember me?” Jimmy asks, keeping his tone neutral.   
  
“To be honest I don’t even know who  _I_  am either. I just. I woke up in here a while ago and… I don’t know. I had my clothes on and that was it. I didn’t even know my name until you told me ten seconds ago, unless you’re mistaking me for someone else.”   
  
Jimmy feels a chill rising from inside his bones.   
  
“You don’t… you don’t remember  _anything_ ?” Jimmy asks, still careful, still neutral.   
  
“Well. Something. Light. And… I said yes to someone. For some reason. But… nothin’ more. I… I dunno how much time I’ve been in here. But the few times I went out I met… strange people with eyes like mine who ask me who I’m waitin’ for and… they just creep me out and I don’t know what to say, so I figured I’d stay here. There was enough food. But I just don’t… do you know anything? About that?”   
  
Dean almost looks hopeful now, like Jimmy could give him answers he has hoped to get for ages.   
  
And Jimmy…   
  
( _It will be as it should.  
  
We’ll build Earth in our image.  
  
Michael will.  
  
We have no right._ )   
  
Jimmy thinks that if he had eaten something past this morning, he’d be throwing up. He remembers that dream well enough.   
  
He thinks instead of speaking. He’s sure it’d work either way.   
  
_He said yes to Michael because your former family probably found him a good reason to do it, Michael possessed him, then when angels were done wiping the human race out they re-made us as vessels and they used Dean for… for some kind of model zero and then Michael left and he wiped his memories, and since he was there he killed you before going back home?_  Jimmy thinks at Castiel, hoping against hope that he’s wrong.   
  
“Yes,” Castiel says inside his head, and he sounds so  _sad_  that Jimmy can’t help feeling sorry for him.   
  
“Hey, you said you know something?” Dean interrupts, and Jimmy focuses on him again. “Can you… can you give me some answers? Did we know each other?”   
  
“Yes,” Jimmy answers, moving slowly so that he sits at the table, too. Dean sits back and he lets out a breath of relief.   
  
“Christ, you don’t know how good is it to see someone… like me around, I guess. Those… those other ones, they’re just… they’re freaky, y’know?”   
  
“I do,” Jimmy answers, and then Dean raises his head and looks at him again.   
  
“So? Can you… I dunno, tell me something more?”   
  
“Yes. Your… your name is Dean Winchester. Does it… say anything to you?”   
  
Dean shrugs. “It feels right, I guess. I didn’t have an idea.”   
  
“Okay. I am Jimmy. Jimmy Novak. This… this used to be my house. Does it remind you of anything?”   
  
“Nope. Sorry, man, it’s all…”   
  
“It’s okay. You… well, you had a brother. His name was Sam. But by this point I think that I can safely say that he’s dead.”   
  
“He is,” Castiel supplies, but Jimmy doesn’t report it.   
  
“I… I don’t remember him. At all. Or my father. Or my mother. Or  _anyone_ ,” Dean asks, sounding merely resigned. “And… what’s this? I mean, it’s… I know it’s  _wrong_ . I know it wasn’t like this at some point before, even if I don’t remember how it was. Who are they? What…”   
  
“Dean. I have the answers. But… they might sound crazy. Will you… will you try to believe me?”   
  
“Hey, seems like you’re better off than I am. Shoot. I had a feeling they might be crazy, anyway.”   
  
“Things used to be different, yes. But… well, the apocalypse happened. These are the results. It was… it was angels who did it. And one of them was possessing you.”   
  
Dean’s hand shakes and he becomes paler by the second, but he holds Jimmy’s stare while biting his lip.   
  
“How does an angel possess you?” he whispers, and Jimmy looks at his own hands.   
  
“They ask you and you say yes.”   
  
“Why would I have done that? And how do you know?”   
  
“Because I said yes, too, but the one inside me tried to stop it. And I figured the one inside you must have given you good enough reasons to do it.”   
  
“That’s why I remember saying yes to someone?”   
  
Jimmy nods and for a long while they don’t say anything.   
  
“It was one hundred years ago,” Jimmy says then, breaking the silence. “You and me are left because… well, the angels in us… the one in me got killed and yours just left you and went back home I guess.”   
  
“And he took my memories with him?” Dean supplies, and at least he sounds like himself.   
  
“Yes, but I think that before he sort of used you… for some kind of template. For them. That’s why they have your eyes.”   
  
“Who the fuck was possessing me, the boss of them all?” Dean almost shouts, and Jimmy can’t help chuckling. It stops when he hears Castiel half-chuckling, too. At least Dean hasn’t changed that much, memories missing or not.   
  
“You could say that,” Jimmy says, and then he shakes his head. “You don’t know how much I missed a normal conversation.”   
  
“But what the fuck are  _they_  anyway?”   
  
“They? Oh, they’re like us, just new and improved. They don’t need much food, they don’t need clothes, they don’t need anything at all actually, and if the angel they’re made for needs to possess them, he doesn’t even need to ask permission because that’s all they think they exist for. Neat, right?”   
  
“… what the fuck,” Dean comments.   
  
“Amen,” Jimmy replies, and then he decides he needs to ask the one thing he’s terrified of asking.   
  
“Dean, can I… if I say Castiel, does that remind you of anyone?”   
  
Dean stares at him for a handful of seconds, his face concentrated, like he’s trying hard to remember it, but then he shakes his head in defeat.   
  
“Nope. Zero. Should it?”   
  
It sounds horrible, but Jimmy thinks that Castiel, right there, or what’s left of Castiel now, is crying.   
  
_I’m sorry_ , he thinks, hard, because he is. After all, Castiel… Castiel did it all for  _Dean_  and now he’s dying inside Jimmy and…   
  
And Dean doesn’t even remember him.   
  
“I knew,” Castiel’s voice replies, and it’s so tiny and so impossibly  _sad_  that Jimmy thinks that if Castiel asked him to say yes again now so that he could at least say goodbye to Dean in person, he probably would agree. “I have known all along. It’s… it’s better like this.”   
  
“Are you crazy?” Jimmy thinks at him. “He doesn’t even remember you!”   
  
“Do you think he would have been able to live with himself if he had his memories?” Castiel replies, sounding even more sad. And well, Jimmy has hosted Castiel enough to know that Dean would have probably killed himself on the spot.   
  
“No, but it’s still not  _right_ ,” Jimmy objects.   
  
“Jimmy, none of this was right. And for it, I am sincerely sorry.”   
  
“Stop apologizing!”   
  
Screaming inside your head isn’t a nice experience, but Jimmy can’t start talking to himself with Dean in front of him.   
  
“It wasn’t your fault. You tried to stop it, at least.”   
  
“I still ruined your life,” Castiel answers, tired, and Jimmy knows that there’s not much time left.   
  
“I… it’s still better than just dying without even knowing why, right? Listen, if… it’s useless by now, but if it’s any good for you, I forgive you.”   
  
Suddenly Jimmy feels warm.   
  
There’s heat coming from somewhere in the left side of his breast, almost pulsing, almost like a second heart. Dean is staring at him like he’s behaving strangely.   
  
If only he knew.   
  
“Thank you,” Castiel says, and Jimmy feels almost flooded, like Castiel was about to possess him again and –   
  
“No, I am not. I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Castiel answers, sounding just a tiny bit amused, “but… could I ask one last favor of you?”   
  
“Well, let’s hear it.” Jimmy couldn’t have said anything else, right?   
  
“Keep… keep an eye on him. But I think you would have done it anyway, wouldn’t you?”   
  
“Hey, not only the second last man on Earth but one I used to know? That’s good enough for me.” He paused. “You didn’t want to ask me that.”   
  
“No, you’re right. That wasn’t what I wanted to ask you. If… if you ever feel inclined to tell him who I was, one day… I would appreciate it,” Castiel says, and the heat is fading away and Jimmy wishes he could just  _stop_  it.   
  
He can’t.   
  
“Okay,” Jimmy says, and if he could see Castiel right now, he thinks he’d see him smile.   
  
“Thank you,” Castiel answers, and then Jimmy feels suddenly cold and  _empty_  and…   
  
And.   
  
And Castiel is gone. Forever.   
  
  
“Hey, man, are you… what’s going on? You look freaked out,” Dean says, coming to Jimmy’s side, one hand on his wrist, and Jimmy just shakes his head and takes a breath.   
  
“It’s okay. I just, I had a moment. You know, I have been living in a tree for a year and you’re the first real person I’ve talked to since I woke up a year ago. I’m… overwhelmed?” he says, and Dean just shakes his head and drags the seat close.   
  
“Well, I’d have more than a moment if I were you. I think I need a fucking moment myself, if only to process the whole thing.”   
  
“I can believe that,” Jimmy whispers.   
  
And then it just… it comes crashing down on him.   
  
He’s sitting in his kitchen in his house, Dean Winchester is in front of him and while he doesn’t remember his brother or Jimmy or Castiel he’s in one piece and he’s  _human_ , and Castiel was real and now he’s  _gone_  and Jimmy had thought he wasn’t real for one year, and Amelia is gone and Claire is gone and…   
  
In his previous life, Jimmy Novak never acted much on impulse, but his previous life is over forever and he doesn’t know he’s hugging Dean to death until he has done it already.   
  
He almost gasps when Dean hugs him back but he just…   
  
He never knew how he missed human contact until just now, and Dean probably didn’t either or they wouldn’t be clutching at each other even if Dean doesn’t remember him and Jimmy knew him for two days and those were the two worst days of his previous life. But it feels good, it feels real, it feels more perfect than heaven on earth does, and well, things might be fucked, but at least it’s two of them and just for that it beats what Jimmy has been doing until now.   
  
They stay like that for a long time and then they move away a bit, arms still touching, and Dean half smiles up at him.   
  
“Are you crying because you’re really that happy to see me or what? Were we best friends or somethin’?” he asks, almost joking, and Jimmy wishes he could say  _no, but you and the angel inside me probably were_ . He hadn’t even realized he was crying, but you’ll forgive him. He’s had a tough day.   
  
“You and me, not exactly, but I knew someone with whom you kind of were. And… sorry. I’m not sure I’m really dealing well with this.” What can he say?”   
  
“Man, believe me, I’m not either. But… you think we could stick together now? I just… I’m not sure I can take staying alone much longer. It’d be kind of awful if you kicked me out, right?”   
  
“It would. And I think us… us real people should stick together, too. We could… maybe stay here for a while and then figure it out. I’m not ready to go back to sleep in a tree,” Jimmy says, and Dean nods in sympathy.   
  
“Yeah, good point. And maybe… well, I guess you could tell me stuff? I just… I don’t remember  _anything_  but seems like you know stuff and… I’d like to know that. Even if I can’t remember living it,” he adds, quietly, and Jimmy can’t keep himself from nodding at that. They’re still half-hugging, but he isn’t sure he’ll move anytime soon.   
  
“Sure. I think I have enough to keep you entertained.”   
  
“Yeah, and who’s my supposed best friend anyway?” Dean asks, and Jimmy was the closest to happy he could get until one second ago. But as soon as Dean asks that, he has to breathe to gather himself.   
  
“I asked you if Castiel reminded you of someone,” Jimmy asks, sitting down again. Dean does, too, and he leans with an elbow on the kitchen table.   
  
“You did. And… nada. What, that was his name?”   
  
“Yes,” Jimmy answers, mirroring the position.   
  
“Well, you look like you need a burger and there was some dried meat around. Want me to make you one while you tell me about him? For some reason electricity works in here,” Dean says, and his eyes are warm and Jimmy regrets that he hasn’t thanked Castiel for the precautions he took.   
  
“Sounds like a good offer to me. All right, I’ll have that burger.”   
  
“Good. So, who was this Castiel guy?”   
  
Jimmy smiles in spite of himself. “He wasn’t a guy. He was an angel. And you called him Cas.”   
  
He starts talking and tells all of the story he knows, not omitting anything.   
  
And even if the world is still fucked up, if they’re the only two other human beings alive on this planet and if Jimmy is sure that while he hasn’t gone insane for a miracle some part of him will always be fucked up, and if everything is far from all right, it still… for the first time in a year, thinking about what happens next doesn’t make him want to throw up.   
  
He also highly doubts that things will get better or that they will find other people or that Heaven on Earth is ever going to become just Earth again, but at least he has a reason to keep on being around. It’s a whole lot more than he’d have hoped for a month ago.


	4. epilogue

The sun is still shining up there and Jimmy keeps on wondering why is it that it never rains.   
  
Maybe angels don’t like rain. At times he just wishes that the weather wasn’t… so perfect. He misses the times when the weather could suck, exactly like human race had the chance to suck, but those times are gone. He’ll never make peace with it, but maybe one day he’ll just accept it the way you accept inevitable things. He kind of dreads thinking of that day.   
  
“At times I wonder if we just should leave,” Dean says from his right side. They’re standing on the porch, strangely pristine in the middle of a devastated road. Jimmy wonders that too, because this might have been the last gift Castiel had for him or them, but can they really stay here forever or until they waste away? Or should they try to find someone else and… do something, whatever it could be? If there’s someone else around, which isn’t even a sure bet.   
  
“At times I ask myself the same. At least we have the choice, right? Differently from everyone else around.”   
  
It’s still more than the vessels have, after all. They don’t have a choice just because they don’t know what choice means.   
  
“Yeah, right. Shit, they freak me out so much.”   
  
“Me too, but I’ll agree with you that you’re entitled to be freaked out by the whole lot of them. They don’t have my eyes, after all.”   
  
Dean shivers and Jimmy sighs. He has told him the entire story, and Dean still doesn’t remember anything. At this point Jimmy thinks he never will.   
  
Castiel might have been right, but Dean still should have had a choice. Angels are dicks, really. Jimmy has changed idea on a lot of things, and one of them is that he’s glad he still remembers how it was before. Who he was before. The fact that he’s the only one who does (because while Dean is human, he doesn’t know how it was anymore) still makes him uncomfortable, but someone should know, and if it has to be him, he’ll deal with it.   
  
“And where would we go?” Jimmy asks then, and Dean shrugs.   
  
“I dunno. Somewhere?”   
  
None of them has much hope that other people survived. If they did, it’d be no one they already know.   
  
“Sounds better than nowhere,” Jimmy murmurs, and he knows it won’t happen today. Or tomorrow.   
  
But soon. Sooner than later.   
  
He doesn’t even know if he’s looking forward to it. Then again, having a doubt is better than not knowing what doubt is.   
  
“Well, we’ll see, I guess. If I ask you to tell me about Cas again will you kill me?”   
  
Jimmy wishes he had more he could tell Dean about his brother or his family, but what he knows is what Castiel knew and Castiel is Jimmy’s strong topic. But there’s something in the way Dean looks at him whenever he asks, like he hopes that if Jimmy tells him something enough times that he’d remember it, and who is Jimmy to deny him that?   
  
“I doubt I’d kill you over something so trivial. Of course.”   
  
He starts talking, and if for the entire time he glances up at the sky and he doesn’t see a single cloud, it’s nothing new.   
  
End.


End file.
